Origin of the New Hebrideans. 147 
wars keep the various tribes very much isolated, and encourage, 
if they do not necessitate, the use of different tongues. 
It is a well-known fact, that if there be no fixed standard, 
a language will quickly alter; and that if, under these circum- 
stances, peoples originally speaking the same language be 
separated and kept apart, and opposed to each other in war 
and stratagem, their language will, in course of time, be 
found to have developed into different dialects; and will 
diverge more and more, until, in the course of a generation, 
these become so different as to entitle them to be called 
different languages. , 
I now come to the last point in connection with the 
inhabitants of these islands—their probable origin. This 
question is rather a difficult one to settle. There seems, 
however, little doubt but that they are a people mixed of the 
Papuan negro and the Malay of Eastern Polynesia ; for we 
find in all of them certain traces of negro blood, and, 
at the same time, among many of them we find un- 
doubted signs of Malay extraction—the most convincing of 
which is their speaking a dialect of the Malay tongue. 
The Malay fowls, too, might help to settle the ethnological 
problem, if any further evidence were wanted. 
From what I have observed among them, I am inclined to 
adopt the opinion expressed by Williams, which was to this 
effect—that the negro races were the original inhabitants of 
most of those Pacific islands, but that the Malay, superior in 
strength and cunning, came upon them from the shores of 
Asia, and have exterminated them from all the islands, ex- 
cept the large ones like Australia and New Guinea, or those 
groups such as the New Hebrides and Fiji, where they were 
comparatively numerous and strong. In these the Malay have 
amalgamated with the negro. 
LQ 
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